The Forever Man: A Near-Future Thriller (36 page)

He strolls up his sidewalk, sprints up the steps, and opens the front door. Inside, two security men acknowledge him with nods of solemn vigilance. He nods in return and heads for the kitchen, where he fetches a beer from the refrigerator, then opens the sliding door to the patio with an energetic swing.

And there is the Bird, sitting on one of the chairs that surround the big iron table with its frosted glass top. He wears a tailored sport shirt, creased wool slacks, and wicker loafers.

“Harlan!” he says as rises to shake Green’s hand. “Sorry to intrude, but there’s—” He stops and looks Harlan up and down. “Jesus! Do you look good! You taking vitamins or something?”

Harlan senses it going terribly wrong. “No, nothing like that. To tell you the truth, I had a little work done. Goes with the trade, you know.”

The Bird vigorously nods in agreement. “Sure. Goes with the trade. Absolutely.” He pauses and savors Harlan’s mounting anxiety. “So what kind of work was it?”

“Oh, you know. Skin treatments. A little nip here and there. Some laser zaps. The usual rejuve stuff.”

“Boy, if you ask me, it’s a lot more than usual. It’s absolutely terrific. Who did it? I want to sign up.”

“Uh, that might be a little difficult.”

The Bird feigns disappointment. “Oh yeah? How come?”

“It’s an offshore clinic. It has a waiting list a mile long. I don’t think they’ll be taking new customers anytime soon. I had to sign a confidentiality agreement just to get into the queue.”

“Understood.” The Bird brings his powerful hand down on Harlan’s shoulder. “Hey, why don’t you put in a good word for me? See what you can do, okay?”

“Sure. Let me give it a try.”

The Bird removes his hand and backs away to leave. “You know what? All that other stuff I had for you can wait. It’s a beautiful day and you’re a beautiful guy, so enjoy. See you later.”

“I’ll save some time for tomorrow. Thanks for coming by.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Green watches the Bird’s back as he walks through the sliding door. Alarm signals ricochet off the inside of his skull from every conceivable angle.

“Point taken, Lane Anslow,” the Bird declares as he climbs into the front of the SUV a block down from Green’s. “He fucked me. He cut me out of the deck.” A riptide of anger floods his face.

“So what did he tell you?” Lane asks from behind the wheel.

“He said it was done at some upscale joint offshore that wouldn’t even consider the common man. Bullshit. All bullshit.”

“That’s all?”

The Bird locks eyes with Lane in a murderous stare. “That’s plenty. You fuck with me, I fuck with you. Very simple.”

Lane starts the engine and pulls out from the curb. “We need to get you a new lobe,” he declares flatly. “Right away.”

“How come?”

“Just a precaution. You may have fucked with someone a lot more dangerous than Harlan Green. We don’t know yet.”

Outside, the neatly trimmed neighborhood rolls by, a façade for the phalanx of security within.

“Well, bring ’em on,” the Bird says. “There’s something that I want to know, and I want to know it now.”

“What’s that?”

“You never told me your source. You didn’t figure all this out on your lonesome. You had inside help.”

“You’re right,” Lane admits. “And I think the time has come for you two to meet.”

Zed stares out his office window at the exquisitely tended islands of shrubs and flowers on the descending slopes beneath his residence. He drums his fingers on the armrests of his swivel chair with a savage force that unsettles Arjun. His boss no longer lives in a state of physical retreat. Without warning, Zed swivels his chair at alarming speed to face Arjun, who sits across a spacious desk topped with premium marble.

“Play it one more time,” Zed orders.

Both men turn toward a video display on the wall as the audio interface responds to Zed’s command. Harlan Green appears with his patio in the background, just as he did to Arjun only a few minutes before. Zed listens intently as the politician spills out his frantic tale of an offshore rejuve facility. It would seem from the Bird’s behavior that he knows precisely why Harlan looks ten years younger.

When the video concludes, Zed springs out of his chair and moves to the window. Arjun still finds the wobbly yet explosive kinetics of the renovated Zed somewhere between annoying and disturbing. They seem all wrong for someone who looks to be hovering around forty. Are they a spontaneous expression of resurgent youth, or blatant exhibitionism? Arjun can’t be sure.

“You know what Richard Nixon said when everything started to go to hell during Watergate?” he asks Arjun.

“No.”

“ ‘We’ve got to cut the loss fast.’ Problem was he didn’t follow his own advice. He made the big mistake of letting it drag out, and it’s not going to be ours. We need to act quickly and decisively. Get the best contract people and make it happen.”

“I’ll do it, but we have to understand that it may not be enough. The longer the Bird’s loose with what he knows, the bigger the potential for more leakage. I think we need the fallback plan.”

Zed shoves his hands in the pockets of his jeans and stalks back toward his desk. The fallback plan happens in stages. During the first stage, demolition charges are put in place to destroy the core facility. In the second, Zed is evacuated from his residence atop the mountain. In the third, Arjun initiates demolition and joins Zed at a remote location. All the contract personnel are left to fend for themselves. Their loyalty lasts only as long their paycheck, and they’ll cave at
the first sign of serious aggression. “All right,” Zed responds. “Let’s get on it.

Zed plops back into his chair after Arjun leaves. He finds one consolation in the current crisis. Autumn. Circumstances will soon demand that his life on Mount Tabor come to an end. He’ll be free to move on and start over with her.

***

“Well, now,” the Bird says with a tepid grin as Rachel steps out of the car. “Why am I not surprised?”

The Bird, Lane, Rachel, and two vehicles form an oasis in the center of a paved desert nearly two square miles in area. Long ago, virgin automobiles and weathered shipping containers covered its dark asphalt surface. Now only the huge gantry cranes remain, standing watch over the barren expanse and all that it represents in terms of lost trade, lost commerce, and lost souls. No cameras here. No microphones. Only a cloudy breeze off the Columbia River, its waters hopelessly poisoned by the disaster upstream at Hanford twenty years back.

“We so seldom see each other,” replies Rachel to the Bird. “I wonder why.”

“I take it that Harlan believes in the separation of church and state,” Lane observes as the pair warily assess each other. “I think this might be a great time for a meaningful dialogue. Let’s start with what you have in common.”

“Simple,” the Bird says to Rachel. “Your boss seems to be preaching one thing to your adoring followers, and doing quite another. Looks like he’s found a higher power. Tough to compete with life everlasting, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“So how did all this go down?” the Bird asks, turning to Lane. “How do you know what you know? And why do think your brother’s up there?”

“He was the key scientist in developing the technology,” Lane says.

“He thought they were going to kill him to keep the project secret,” Rachel adds. “So he came to me and wanted to make a deal with Green for protection, but Green sold him out.”

“Yeah, Harlan seems to have a real knack for that,” the Bird observes. He recalls the special job they did for Green, the guy they kidnapped from the bar in the War Front, the really smart guy, the guy they had to keep drugged. It has to be Lane’s brother, but he keeps his silence on the matter. “I know for a fact that our Mr. Green recently made a little unscheduled nighttime visit up to Mount Tabor,” the Bird adds.

“I also would like to make an unscheduled visit and ask about the current whereabouts of
my brother,” Lane says.

“Why think small?” the Bird replies. “We go in and hold the place up for ransom. All that technology has to be worth a fortune. I mean, how much will people pay to have teenage balls forever?”

“I think we need to think this thing through a little more thoroughly,” Lane cautions.

“Maybe we should simply confront Harlan,” Rachel suggests. “That could give us some bargaining power, and bring Mount Tabor down without a fight.”

“I don’t know who’s in charge up there,” Lane says. “But when they tracked me down in Pima, they weren’t interested in negotiating.”

“Suppose we all go away and give it some thought,” Rachel says, “and then meet back here tomorrow. Same time, same place.”

“Twenty-four hours,” the Bird says. “That’s it. If nobody’s got a better idea, we’re going in.”

***

“I don’t like the lobe.”

The Bird points toward his right ear as he takes a sip of custom-ground Peruvian coffee brewed in the little shop on Twelfth Avenue in the Pearl. A half-eaten cantaloupe rests on a plate in front of him, a dish with an artful glaze fired in a kiln somewhere far south of here. Behind him, a half dozen customers sip coffee and munch on pastries. All large, male, and part of the Bird’s security team. They are a bad fit amid the tasteful décor and cheerful lighting, but the Bird couldn’t care less, and staff here cares very much about what the Bird thinks.

“We’ll get you a better one when we get a chance,” Lane tells him. “But right now, just think of it as cheap insurance.”

“Did you get a good look at my old lobe? Gold plate. Microcarving of an eagle. Scrimshaw deluxe. Little diamonds in each corner.”

“What did you do with it?” For an instant, Lane thinks he might have just put it in his pocket, leaving a dangerous trail of digital crumbs behind him. Lane has to marvel at the strange mixture of shrewdness and recklessness that simmers inside this man.

“I left it back at my place.” The Bird points his thumb over his shoulder out the window toward a tall building two blocks down. Its tasteful earthen veneer mutes the light from the morning sun in the cloudless sky. “A safe in the wall. You just can’t trust the help anymore.”

Lane has to wonder why someone like the Bird is concerned about theft by the domestic staff. He lets it remain a mystery.

The Bird stands. “Let’s get back. I need to feed Rocky before we take off.”

They walk out into the morning air and start down Twelfth. That’s when Lane first hears the sound: a kind of fizzing, like uncorked champagne, or the froth atop soapy dishwater.

The Heliraptor, a suicide machine born of global industry: avionics from Tel Aviv, airframe from Korea, firmware from Palo Alto, engine from Hanoi. A one-way expression of explosive mayhem in the extreme. It claims its ancestry from the predators, the drones of old that circled lazily then dived for the kill with missile fire, then returned to base, hardware intact, investment preserved. Not so with the Heliraptor, an unmanned helicopter designed for the most sensitive of missions, where traceability was not an option. After launching its two missiles, it briefly confirmed the results and self-destructed.

On this clear morning, one such machine skims over the rusted framework of the Broadway Bridge on its way to the Pearl.

“If we have to force our way up into Mount Tabor, it could get pretty ugly,” Lane tells the Bird as they walk the first of two blocks back to his penthouse. The security trails them from a discreet distance down the block.

“We don’t how well the place is defended,” Lane continues. “If the gate is any indication, it could be tough. And if my brother’s up there, he could get in the line of fire.”

The Bird shrugs. “Not likely. He’s high-priced merchandise. They’re not going to put him where he’s going to go down.”

“And what if they do?”

The Bird stops and glares at Lane. “Tell you what, I’m going make you a very special deal just to get you off my back. If we go in, you go in first. I’ll give you a chance to fish him out before things get heavy. Satisfied?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Lane turns his head east toward the river, where the fizzing has suddenly gotten louder.

The Heliraptor skims between two buildings on Tenth Avenue. Its powerful electric engine makes hardly a sound. The only noise is the effervescent beat of the rotor blades slicing the air. It measures about thirteen feet in length, and consists of nothing but a bare frame of carbon fiber with a small crossbar holding the missiles. Two high-res cameras peer forward, and a container about the size of a shoebox holds the electronics, which chatter with a satellite overhead in the tranquil blue. And within this container, a specialized, proprietary circuit performs its function with superb accuracy. Out of all the lobes hung on all the humanity below, it isolates the Bird’s.

The Heliraptor pilot sits in a darkened room in Bangkok and watches the video feed off the satellite link. Raised on Xbox and Playstation, he views the image in distant and abstract terms. As the target building comes into view, the display puts up a semitransparent circle indicating the location of the Bird’s lobe in the penthouse.

Rocky performs an atavistic calculation that equates the rotor’s buzz with a swarm of highly edible insects. The armadillo scampers through an open door and out onto the deck, where it hops up on a piece of lawn furniture. It spots a giant black bug, something like a dragonfly, quivering motionless in the air not thirty feet away.

“What the fuck is that?” The Bird’s jaw drops slightly after he asks the question. He and Lane halt on the sidewalk to behold the strange craft hovering a block and a half away and a dozen stories up. A helicopter, too big to be a model, too small to be the real thing. Everybody on the street has stopped to stare.

“Hey, it’s up by my place,” the Bird observes.

“Oh, Jesus,” Lane says. “It’s found your lobe.”

The last thing the armadillo ever sees is the flash and twin streaks screaming toward the penthouse. Each missile carries a warhead designed to spread a horrible fan of shrapnel across an arc of nearly 180 degrees. The fan’s vertical spread is highly constrained and focuses the damage into a narrow plane that concentrates on the penthouse floor. When the warheads explode, a million metal shards perforate, puncture, and shred every square foot. Sheared wiring creates electrical arcs near punctured gas lines that feed the Bird’s industrial-class stove. A great ball of flame and smoke belches out of the kitchen and onto the deck.